I had a great time talking to Tucker Max, author of the notorious NYT Best-selling book I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell, and evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller, author of The Mating Mind and Spent, on their new Mating Grounds podcast. I have to figure out how to get to Austin and go wild boar hunting with Tucker Max. That sounds like a good story…

Transsexuals, especially male transsexuals, are tormented souls torn between what they are and a desire to be something they can never truly become. I have some sympathy for their predicament, but I think the well-meaning progressive doctors and therapists who push them to “transition” are abusing them for ideological reasons, and because saying “no” feels mean. They’re indulging them and spoiling them like parents who let their obese children live on pizza and candy “because that’s what they want.”

Since homosexuality was decriminalized and gay marriage has become politically inevitable, forward thinking professional gay activists — who preferred to distance themselves from transsexuals when they were still seeking mainstream legitimacy for themselves — have recognized that “transsexual is the new gay.” Transsexualism is going to be pushed as completely normal by the progressive media for the foreseeable future, and objections will be drowned out by the outrage pornographers who now dominate mainstream American discourse.

I do believe a silent — petrified, even — majority believes that encouraging transsexuality, especially in children, is infuriatingly abusive to the point of being evil. But few will risk being vilified as bigots to question the narrative. Provocateur Gavin McInnes, who I still think of as kind of a disgruntled liberal, was forced to take a leave of absence from a company he co-founded after his trans-faux-pas, and anyone who isn’t already independently wealthy will avoid making the same mistake. Using the right pronoun for a man who had surgery to look like a woman will become thought crime, and there’s nothing any of us can do about it.

Instead of arguing about the validity of the claims made by transsexuals, I wrote a piece for RADIX about some of the reasons why transsexuality fits so harmoniously into progressive visions for the future — aside from it being the ultimate “fuck you” to the “cisgender community” and the ultimate progressive boogeyman — the masculine white male. In many ways, the transsexual is the progressive ideal — a post-human, blank slate, interchangeable consumer who can be decorated with disposable and ultimately inconsequential identities.

Paying nine bucks for a simple drink seems like a waste of money, so when I go out to one of Portland’s many great restaurants, I try something made with ingredients I can’t afford to keep stocked in my globe bar at home.

I’m not going to play Garth Brooks and pretend I’m just too darn simple to appreciate anything but Jack Daniels and Budweiser. Dude probably laughs and guzzles champagne with Beluga and blinis every time he does an encore of “Friends in Low Places” for the Wal-Mart country crowd. I’ve been around good food for years, and I know what I like.

We’re living in a renaissance of fine drink mixing, and while you’ll never hear me say “mixologist” or “artisan cocktail,” bartenders really are doing some nifty things with booze. I’ve had some truly inventive, artfully-balanced and complex drinks in the past few years.

Unfortunately, the hipster trend is to serve them in foofy stemware. Having learned this, I order whatever I feel like drinking, but ask the waitress to have it poured into a double-old fashioned glass, because I don’t want to sit around with my pinky out, pinching the fragile little stem of something that looks like it belongs at a tea party for Polly Prissy Pants.

So, last night I ordered this beverage I really like at a fine establishment that will go unnamed to protect the innocent, and told the waitress I wanted it in a DOF or “something a little more manly” than the champagne flute or whatever they were going to serve it in. She comes back with my drink the way I wanted it, but told me “the bartender says that glassware has no gender.”

Obviously, the bartender was a woman, and she must have confused her job pouring drinks with a Huffington Post comment thread.

But more importantly, she was also incorrect.

Many objects can be gendered, including glassware.

Hell, one of the guys at the gym told me the other day that I was using the girly ab roller and I should switch to the manly one. Apparently, you can also gender ab rollers.

One of the reasons I developed a comprehensive theory of masculinity was that I wanted to be able to apply a formula to reasonably assess whether a behavior or even a thing was more or less masculine.

Men all have their opinions about what is masculine and what isn’t, but they can’t usually explain why they think the way they do. Usually, they are just repeating something they’ve heard or making some kind of cultural association.

Culture matters — because culture is theoretically about what the men of our tribe associate with masculinity. It makes sense to care about what your father and grandfather thought was masculine.

But out in the gray zone of globalist modernity, where most people don’t even have a tribe or much of a culture that wasn’t advertised to them by some corporation, I think the formula is what really matters.

The opinion of some female is irrelevant — masculinity is primarily about signalling to men. My drinking buddy was a guy from my gym, and we agreed that we were probably the biggest, manliest guys in the dining room at that moment. (In downtown Portland, that isn’t a big achievement.)

We had no one to impress, but masculinity is a way of being. You don’t turn it off and giddily act like a teenage girl just because no one is there to judge you. I’m still watching me, and I have to respect myself in the morning.

Speakers of Latin languages have long believed that objects can be gendered — though sometimes strangely, arbitrarily, or for long lost cultural reasons. I can’t tell you why the French think a day is masculine or a table is feminine. They just do.

I was recently searching for the right font for a project, and Fonts.com users have tagged certain fonts as being “masculine.” The masculine fonts are predictably sturdier and stronger-looking, tend to be sans-serif (because serifs are kinda fancy), and related tags include “legible,” “clean,” “geometric,” “technical,” and “sturdy.” They read as direct, solid, functional, bold and authoritative. The “masculine” fonts fit the pattern and more or less communicate the universal masculine tactical virtues of Strength, Courage and Mastery as I laid them out in The Way of Men. (It’s hard for letters to have Honor.)

You can look at an object, compare it to other similar objects, and gender it according to the tactical virtues based on both how it looks and how a man would use it. It’s somewhat subjective, but if you asked a room with 100 men from all different cultures to pick out glasses and determine which ones were masculine and which ones were feminine, the more fragile looking glasses would consistently be rated as less masculine, and the heavier, sturdier glasses would be rated as more masculine. The masculine virtue of strength alone would be enough to gender the glassware. (I’m not sure how courageous a glass can really be.)

There’s another reason why men prefer certain kinds of glassware — it has to do with the way you hold the glass. For instance, a few years ago I had a little debate with a pal over martini glasses.

As a gin drinker, if I’m not driving anywhere and I really feel like getting my drink on, I’ll open with a dry martini or four. It’s basically a glass full of gin, and a classic man’s drink. (Ladies’ drinks like “chocolate martinis” are not regarded as martinis proper by any competent drinker or bartender).

After ordering my martini “up” in a martini glass, the guy I was drinking with chuckled in that snidely bemused way that men do when another man does something that seems a bit off.

I argued that, for me, the martini glass was a Las Vegas, Sinatra, “rat-pack” kind of thing. I started drinking martinis during that whole 1990s lounge music and cocktail revival period, so that was my cultural association. I’ve had a martini at Musso & Frank’s in Los Angeles, and that’s the way they’ve been serving them since Humphrey Bogart and Gary Cooper were drinking there.

I still think that’s perfectly valid, but my friend Andy won me over to the idea that the gesture and hand position required to hold a martini glass was more meaningful than the cultural association.

A pint glass, double old-fashioned glass, and a beer mug all offer a solid hold. With a mug, your hand is basically making a fist, and if you actually clobbered a man with the mug itself, you wouldn’t be the first. Same goes for bottled beer. Cans can be crushed on the forehead as a threatening gesture, but only at a hillbilly barbecue or a frat party. What are you going to do with a champagne flute or a martini glass? That’s right, not a damn thing. Pint glasses, beer cans and DOFs probably don’t make the best weapons, granted, but the hand position communicates strength and control, compared to the delicate pinching required to hold a martini or cocktail glass.

It’s a small thing, and it doesn’t matter much, but why not make the manlier choice?

These days when I’m out in public, if I order a martini, I order it shaken and neat, or on the rocks. And if I’m sampling a complicated drink with bitters or some imported liqueur that’s been made by monks for 300 years, I make sure I don’t have to drink it out of a vintage pink champagne coupe.

When I write about things like this, there’s always going to be some guy who says, “real men don’t think about whether what they do is masculine or not.” This is the fetishization of stupidity and the confusion of stupidity with masculinity.

One might as well say that real men don’t think about what they do at all. This is strange position, given that men invented philosophy.

Clearly, men do think about what they do and why they do it, and I guarantee you that if I were given a position of authority over any man who says he doesn’t care how other men perceive him, I could give him something to do that he would grumble about because he felt like it was emasculating.

“You don’t think about masculinity or about how other men perceive you? OK. Your new uniform is pink spandex with sequins, and every morning we’re going to start the day by doing pole dancing to “Single Ladies” by Beyoncé. We’re going to do this in public where hundreds of people will see you.”

If that’s not going to be a problem for you, you’re probably already too far gone to be reading this.

Granted, most men don’t sit around philosophically contemplating the relative masculinity of glassware. That’s my job.

Gendering objects, actions and gestures is an educational project, and doing it can bring you to a deeper understanding of masculinity and the behavior of other men. It’s also a good way to check yourself and determine whether you’re sending out some signals you’d like to change, or craft a better argument for why you’re going to keep doing it the way you want to anyway.

In Start The World Episode #8, I interviewed Hunter Cuneo, who runs his own private men’s strength and conditioning gym in California. I’ve talked to a lot of guys who want to start their own gyms for men, but no one seems to think it is possible. This guy is doing it. I asked him how and why. Check out his promo video below.

Heathen Harvest

I spent several weeks working on a back-and-forth email interview with Nathan Leonard for Heathen Harvest. I like doing interviews like this with men who are familiar with my work, because the answers become mini-essays with their own standout quotes and ideas. This one covers a lot of ground.

People today sometimes call them hipsters, but hipster-ism is a pose affected by rude, youthful elves who mock us with Pabst Blue Ribbon and vintage cigarettes because they know that when you live for an average of 700 years, you don’t have to take anything very seriously.

“SWPL,” or “Stuff White People Like” was also a cute euphemism, but we all knew we weren’t talking about “stuff white people like” in general. Lots of white people like Coors Light and know how to fix cars and listen to mainstream country music unironically.

We weren’t talking about those white people, and everyone knew it.

We were talking about creatures with white skin who AREN’T REALLY PEOPLE.

Elves are often mistaken for humans, because they have similar features and white skin, but they tend to be slender and slightly more delicate than the race of men.

I live in Portland, and that’s where I first noticed the obvious differences between humans who live in the suburbs and in the country, and urban elves, who live downtown, shop at Whole Foods, pretend to read UTNE, and see themselves as “stewards of the Earth.” They’re always saying queer, condescending things to humans, like, “why don’t you just evolve?”

The show Portlandia is actually complicated tongue-in-cheek Elvish humor. It’s self-deprecating and neurotic but somehow also celebratory and awkwardly amusing, like Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm.

Elves can breed with humans, but they are embarrassed of their attractions to brutish and short-lived humans so they prefer to murder the children before their Elders find out. This is why elves tend to be feminist and vote Democrat. Elves also tend to be outspoken feminists because the elvish race, which has much in common with the Dwarves (but we’re not going to get into the whole gold-mongering Dwarf thing here), is almost completely androgynous and elvish communities have been matriarchal since their Age of Vulvar began in 33 AD. Elves will often say that “gender is just a construct” because they like to tease “unevolved” humans, who they know full well have more fully differentiated sexes.

Hen-pecked Elvish males are secretly jealous of human men, though, so they work with the Dwarves to market birth control pills, human pornography, soy products, plastics and other products with dysgenic, emasculating effects. They don’t actually consume these products themselves, which is why they can often be spotted at “health food” stores. “Health food” and “organic” are both shortened versions of unpronounceable Elvish words that translate roughly to “not the poison slop we feed stupid humans.” Sadly, wealthy and high-born humans often collude with Elves to push these products on the lower human castes, to keep them weak, compliant and easy to control.

Congressman Mo Brooks came out and said what I’ve known for some time.

The thoroughly Elf and Dwarf-controlled Democratic Party has long been waging a “War on White People” by conducting a massive university-based re-education campaign to get white people to “reject their whiteness” which is code for rejecting their basic human nature, and act more like white Elves. Elves see white humans as a nuisance, and know that if white humans hate themselves and adopt Elvish breeding habits and matriarchal lifeways, they will die out in an Elvish decade or two because of their shorter life spans. Elvish Democrats have also moved to import non-white peoples, orcs and goblins into white human areas as part of their ethnic cleansing campaign. Their secret slogan, which sounds far more sinister in Elvish, is “no white people, no white people problems.” After the extinction of white people, the elves will quickly move to enslave the unsuspecting non-whites, orcs and goblins, and rule planet Earth in alliance with the clever gold-hoarding Dwarves.

Most white people laugh at ideas like a “War on White People,” because they have been glamoured by Elvish magic, so they cannot see the Elves’ pointy ears or creepy high cheekbones. Also, it seems like the people in prominent positions on both sides of this “war” are white. Nancy Pelosi and Hillary Clinton, for instance, are not Elvish, but Elvish yes-people who have been promised immortality by Elves in exchange for their treachery. The joke will be on them, because the Elves lost the secret of passing immortality to humans in 1323 BC, during the Tutankhamen debacle, and this was well known to human scholars until the destruction of the Library of Alexandria in 642 by the Goblin Caliph Omar.

I do not mean for this to sound partisan, because the Republican Party in America, for the most part, simply wolf-whistles about the “War on White People” to create confusion and advance the interests of moneyed white humans, who hope to bargain with Elves after the majority of their white human rubes have been exterminated. They are sneaky backroom dealers and cannot be trusted.

That’s why I’m reaching out to you, common white human.

Let the scales fall from your eyes, my brothers and sisters.

The Elves are not your friends.

Stop taking their “diversity” and “women’s studies” misinformation classes. Stop supporting their puppet “parties.” There is only one political party. THE ELVISH PARTY.

Stop listening to their Elvish “Hollywood” folklore.

These are not your people.

They aren’t even people!

They’re elves, and it’s “us” or “them”

DEATH TO URBAN ELVES!

RUN TO THEIR DOWNTOWN BOUTIQUE STORES AND RIP THEIR ANCIENT HEARTS OUT OF THEIR SKINNY, SUNKEN CHESTS BEFORE IT IS TOO LATE!

When I posted “Clickbait Country” a few days ago, I was making observations based on the kinds of headlines I’d been seeing from formerly “respectable” news sources over the past year.

A Portland pal responded, mentioning the recent transformation of Oregon’s primary paper of record, The Oregonian.

According to the left-wing weekly, Willamette Week, last June the paper’s owners at Advance Publications (which owns more than 25 papers in comparable markets) laid off a quarter of The Oregonian‘s newsroom staff and more than 50 other employees, split up the company, and reduced home delivery to four days a week. That October, they officially switched to a “digital first” model, prioritizing posting to the Oregonlive.com website. Then, frustrated that the paper website was still not web-oriented enough, early this year Advance created incentives for generating traffic and posting shorter articles more often, even if that meant relying more heavily on celebrity gossip, sports, polls, ” news stories written solely about readers’ comments, and photo essays on such subjects as obese cats.”

The Oregonian, still in some sense regarded as the most credible mainstream news source in Oregon, converted to the Gawker model.

Everything is yellow journalism now. No news source is trustworthy. Everything is entertainment.

This has to be driving the uptick in outrage politics, hysterical political correctness, and the virtual tarring and feathering of anyone who becomes the focus of a Twitter hashtag campaign.

If there was ever a rule in yellow journalism, it was “scandal sells.”

Instead of creating news in the absence of news, today’s digital reporters create scandal in the absence of scandal. Because scandals sell.

Read it at Radix Journal

Some guys who objected couldn’t manage to stop tripping over their dicks, and their main beef seemed to be that “chicks who lift are hot.” The point of the essay wasn’t about who men should or shouldn’t find attractive. Feminists don’t get this, because they don’t understand men or the male experience, but boners aren’t political. I could try to project, but frankly I have no idea what the boner that woke me up at 4AM this morning had to say about gender issues or feminism. Men control their words and actions, but erections kinda do what they want.

The essay also wasn’t about attacking women, or athletic women. I have two younger sisters. Both are mothers working hard to stay in great shape, and I’m proud of them both for refusing to become typical American land beasts.

The main point of the essay was that while feminists nag us from their blogs, magazines and Twitter accounts, it is in many cases men who are pushing women to get involved in extreme sports that many feminists would criticize as “hypermasculine” in men — like fighting, strongman, powerlifting, bodybuilding, and so on. These are usually men who would mock effeminate men and hipsters and complain that men aren’t men anymore, but they encourage women to be more masculine, as if the sexes exist in separate vacuums and changes in women don’t influence men. I wrote about some of the reasons why I think men do this, and while their motivations are probably innocent enough, I wanted them to think about how they are impacting men around them, and how their actions contribute to the erosion of sex roles. The places where men train for these “hypermasculine” sports are some of the last redoubts for men who no longer have any other exclusively male spaces. We can’t just expect men to spring forth from the loins of their forefathers as exemplars of manliness without any kind of support or paternal influence. Our manliest forefathers spent much of their time in male groups, being influenced by other men. Females interrupt that process, exert their own influence on male cultures and turn men against each other.

Having observed this over and over again in the real world, and having heard about similar progressions from friends and readers, here’s a basic rule for female participation in male groups.

Donovan’s 10% Law of Female Sex Pollution

A long as females make up less than 5% of the total group, and they are unattractive or no more than moderately attractive, they will be gender-nonconforming exceptions who will adapt to male group culture, respect it, and strive to be considered “one of the guys.” If a majority of the males find her attractive, many of them will be extremely distracted and go out of their way to accommodate, assist, flatter and please her (whether they are married/committed or not). When female participation edges toward 10% and beyond, females will adapt the culture and environment to suit their own tastes and interests. This begins with “the curtains.” Music selections will change, and “family feel-good inclusivity activities” like potlucks, birthday celebrations, mixers and so forth will be introduced. Males will stop speaking freely to avoid offending the females, and when they don’t, females will either confront them directly (uncommon) or attempt to influence a prominent male member to intervene on behalf of women to make the group more “female friendly.” If successful, and the females do not then become bored, as time progresses, they will introduce less adventurous, gender-conforming women to the mix, and those women will require additional cultural changes to feel comfortable in what they still perceive to be a “testosterone-heavy” environment.

Following a consistent 10%-15% female inclusion rate, a phenomenon called “gender pollution” will occur as the group is perceived to be more feminine and loses masculine prestige. Males will “lose interest” in the mixed sex group, which can no longer be seen as the masculine group they were initially drawn to, and membership in the group no longer increases their honor, validates their masculinity, or gives them an opportunity to interact with men without female interference. Because outright sexism is taboo, especially after prominent male members have made “female-friendly” inclusivity overtures, many males will find other “official” reasons to leave the group to save face. Following this purge, the group will become thoroughly mixed, sexism will be rigorously policed and considered absolutely taboo, and there is a high probability that group will become progressively more female-oriented.

The percentages above will vary according to how aggressively feminist the women involved are, but even one extremely aggressive feminist can’t make enough cultural changes to alienate men without some help from “sisters.”

You may or may not be old enough to remember when the Internet was a new thing, but for a long time, web pages were not considered “credible” sources. If you were a serious person trying to make a serious point, you cited books, academic journals, established magazines and venerable old newspapers.

Books are still books, but publishing is more accessible, and more people are aware that a publisher is just someone with a bank account and some means of printing and distribution who is willing to put up some money and do some of the work of publishing for a share of a book’s potential profit. Academic journals are still an arcane, exclusive racket, but a lot of them are just web sites now, too.

Newspapers and magazines have been forced to compete with web sites, and they are losing. Why would anyone bother to subscribe to a newspaper when they can read it online and get updated news in real-time, for free? For the ads and coupons? I’ll admit they are handy for getting coals started when I want to grill a steak, but that’s about it. Brown paper bags work just as well, and they probably burn cleaner.

Certain magazines are still worth keeping around if you have the space. National Geographic, or something special like Lapham’s Quarterly or even VICE. Glossy design magazines are still better than their online editions, if you’re into that sort of thing.

But major news magazines and newspapers have become printed slaves to their online editions. They have to compete for traffic every day with trashy click-bait sites like Upworthy, Gawker and Buzzfeed. Over the past year or so, this seems to have accelerated, and the old printed institutions are becoming indistinguishable from their yellow counterparts.

I have a copy of TIME from 1970 that shows Yukio Mishima’s death scene, with his severed head still sitting on the floor facing the door where he wanted it. The cover story was a forward-thinking report on the organic food movement. TIME famously explored the Nietzschean question, “Is God Dead?” in 1965, opening with a reference to Jean-Paul Sartre. It was always a mainstream magazine, but it at least pretended to be a magazine for serious people.

I have a hard time believing that the people who write this stuff are even sincere. They’re going for the big story, the most shares, the most tweets, the mention on late night television.

I’m not complaining. In fact, I welcome this development. I love that the mainstream media is getting trashier and easier to dismiss.

It makes people more willing to consider what non-mainstream writers have to say.

American newspapers and magazines started out as soap-boxes for entrepreneurs and ideologues. Hearst drove sales with sensational headlines. Every paper was as unapologetically skewed as The Huffington Post. For a few decades, journalism gained a veneer of respectability based on an assumption of objectivity that was probably always more of a charming fiction than a reality. Now the industry is returning to what it always was — a commercial enterprise catering to base elements of human nature and whipping up madness in crowds.

As the “reputable” papers and magazines become increasingly indistinguishable from TMZ , Jezebel,Upworthy or Thought Catalog, they burn credibility as legitimate sources and gatekeepers of ideas. They’re down here with the rest of us on the digital street corner, shouting, trying to get people’s attention. If everyone is spinning everything shamelessly and sensationally, people can just pick the spin they like the best, instead of looking to the mainstream media for “serious journalism” and “reasonable viewpoints.”